This rant is for Molly Ivins, one on my short list of people I always wanted to be like when I grew up. Hell, I still do. God bless her.

As a sometimes fan of the Adult Swim television program called "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and as a never ever fan of the current administration and the "war" on "terror," I adore the recent news from Boston.

That Lite-Brite-like frames portraying Ignignokt and Err flipping the bird could lead to such absurd depths, it has many tasty levels to it. It's like when some conservatives took Stephen Colbert seriously. It's like when Ashcroft erected the big curtain to cover up a boobie. What it's like is, that only a narc would discover a graphic of the Mooninite Marauders and conclude that it's terrorism.

The only reason it isn't as absurd on its face as it could be is that it stands in comparison next to the larger effort that spawned it, the phrase that forces me to break out the scare quotes, the "war" on "terror."

America, I think, was too quick to swallow this monstrous absurdity. We've declared war on poverty, on cancer, and on drugs, but each of those declarations comes with an implied understanding that these "wars" on inantimate objects and concepts are somewhat hyperbolic. The current president has actually declared "war" on a tactic, a war that's unwinnable on its face since you lose so long as there's a boy and a bomb and a dream anywhere in the world and since success can only be gauged by what doesn't happen.

Nearly the whole of what makes George W. Bush such an
intriguing character is that it is close to impossible to ascertain if
he is merely stupid, or if he, in the immortal words of Homer J.
Simpson, "sucks like a fox." Was it mere incompetence and stupidity
that led these people to fire all the Baathists and send them
unemployed and poor into the economy we'd just wrecked, or was it
planned chaos, established so masked men in three-piece suits could
plunder the country? Was the current president just stupid and
therefore asleep at the switch when the airbuses plowed into the
towers, or, as some believe, was there some nefarious design to it?

The answer is that the current president is merely stupid.

When the Supreme Court gave him the office, the current president had
come that far in part due to the profound superstition that, because
Bill Clinton had allowed a woman to suck his penis, Bill Clinton was a
bad president. The current president said he would "restore integrity"
to the White House, the most ironic thing that has ever been said in
the entire history of the universe. The current president decided that
the way to accomplish that was to declare it to be Opposite Day in
America. He withdrew from international treaties. He disengaged from
the Israel peace process. He condemned by executive order clinics
overseas that even said words that rhymed with "abortion." In the
spirit of Presidential Opposite Day, the current president and his
administration directly flouted direct advice from his predecessors
regarding a lanky idiot called Osama Bin Laden.

Actions such as the one we saw this week in Boston and the absurd
declaration of a "war" on "terror" are simply
hyper-super-duper-overcompensations for a president who was asleep at
the switch on and before Sept. 11, 2001, that he rolled his eyes at the
August PDB, that he found Richard Clarke to be an annoying loon, that
he dismissed the credibility of his predecessors' dire and sadly
accurate warnings because of a weird national superstition about a
president who let a woman suck his penis. From that, we get illegal
wiretaps, Abu Ghraib, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the
swift action of those sworn to protect and serve at cartoon characters
run amok.

It does roll downhill. It really does.

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